Category Archives: Retro computing

There are three things that are certain in life – death, taxes and blown capacitors in old electronic equipment. But at least you can do something about the last one. Powering up a 35 year-old computer that has sat in a loft for the past two decades is foolish. But we did it anyway. The BBC Master ran fine for… Read more »

It’s always the same. “I’ll just hack out this quick program,” you think. And you get it to the point where it works and does the job you intended it to do. But then: “Maybe it would be nice if it also did this…” And even when you’ve added all the functionality the program will bear, and your wife is… Read more »

In the last post, I mentioned how I’m using a RetroClinic DataCentre to make it easy to transfer files between the BeebEm emulator on my PC and my real BBC Master 128. A USB memory stick plugged into the DataCentre becomes my main disk drive (*DRIVE 5) for program files. It also holds floppy disk images (single-sided .SSD and double-sided… Read more »

No, this isn’t going to be a tutorial on BBC Basic. Nor am I about to offer programming tips and tricks. This is about being comfortable while hacking. In the last post I wrote about recreating the first serious program I ever wrote on the BBC Micro. And I mentioned that I’d written the code using the BeebEm emulator running on… Read more »

So what was your first program? You know, the first one that meant anything. My guess is that when you unwrapped your first home computer (mine was a Sinclair Spectrum 48K) the lines of code you typed were little more than snippets – changing some colours on the display, perhaps, or making rude words scroll endlessly down the screen. You… Read more »

Ah, there’s nothing quite like the feel of a fresh, crisp OS install. It’s just that the OS I’ve just installed is Windows XP. Now that makes no sense… Or does it? As I’m now playing with my BBC Master again, I felt the need for a Windows machine to have alongside it. There’s a bunch of utilities that run… Read more »

My BBC Master micro is alive again, thanks to a generous donation. So what was wrong with it before? Buggered if I know. The Beeb suddenly developed a fault a couple of years ago. On powering on, it would show the OS greeting and sometimes the disk filing system greeting but would then hang. I tried a few things but,… Read more »

And so to the next instalment of trying to get my Epson MX-80 F/T III dot matrix printer back up and working. Previously on Epson MX-80… Just over a year ago, lots of smoke came out accompanied by a crackling noise. I’ve removed the main smoothing capacitors from the PCB and tested them. They seem fine. I tested the transformer…. Read more »

Time for the next step in my attempt to bring my beloved old EpsonMX-80F/T III dot matrix printer back to life. But first, some pictures of gorgeous old retro components. As we’ll see, they might be all I have left. I do love old resistors. They have so much character. And look how thick the wires are. There’s also a… Read more »

It’s hard to lose an old friend with whom you’ve shared more than a third of a century’s worth of experiences. I’ll never forget the day it happened. I heard a coughing, spluttering noise, turned around and, sure enough, smoke was pouring out of the printer. And not just any old printer – my trusty Epson MX-80F/T III, the first… Read more »

The BBC Micro was the machine that really got me hooked. The Sinclair Spectrum was the gateway micro, but it was the Beeb that got programming into my veins. So much so, indeed, that not long ago I finally gave into temptation and bought a BBC Master Turbo on eBay. It didn’t last long. Although fully refurbished, any machine of that… Read more »

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking … he really should get on with building the damn computer. But I have a thing about fonts, so sue me. I was rather pleased with the original Zolatron 64 logo. I chose a font called Eurostyle because it was the most 1970s-looking one on my machine. Then I read about the history of… Read more »

It’s one of the curses of getting older. One by one your friends die around you. This time the bell tolled for my beloved old Epson MX-80F/T III dot matrix printer. It’s hard to express how much this delightful old beast means to me. Buying it was a huge step because it was so incredibly expensive (kids who buy printers… Read more »

There are some things that are hard to get your head around unless you can actually see them. Being a computer history fan I’ve often read of core memory but never quite got to grips with how it works. So one day recently I just thought, ‘the hell with it – I’ll go on eBay and buy some’. Which I… Read more »

This was something I’d always wondered. When you have data on a bus, how do you ensure it’s read by the device that needs it, and only that device? And when you read data from a device into the microprocessor, how does the processor read data only from that device? What we’re about to embark on here is address decoding…. Read more »

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This is my journey through the worlds of electronics, robotics and retro computing. I’m not an expert – I’m learning as I go, and this is my way of sharing what I’ve learned. Think of it as a geek's diary and lab notebook.